I was taking a sip of Coke and choked, sending soda squirting right out my nose. How many fluids could possibly come out of me in one afternoon? I wiped my chin with the back of my hand and took the note from Cassandra, still in the plastic bag. I stared at it, as if I might be able to read between its meager lines. This was clearly why Cassandra had wanted to join the babysitters club, but I couldn’t believe that her mom’s note was just about finding a way to make a couple of bucks. I looked back up at Cassandra. “What does this mean?”
Cassandra rolled her eyes. “I think it means to find the babysitters,” she said. “So that’s what I did. Now we have to figure out what to do next.”
We. Without asking me, Cassandra had just assumed that we were in this together.
What did I want? I wasn’t sure. I had to admit that part of me felt good. It was like this thing that I hadn’t even admitted to myself was now out in the open. I, Esme Pearl, high school junior with a mediocre GPA, one friend, no driver’s license, chin acne, and zero college prospects, had special powers. Supernatural powers.
It was terrifying.
I took a sip of my soda and swallowed carefully this time to make sure nothing came out of my nose again. Cassandra had gotten up and was standing a few feet away from me, in the middle of the living room, but Dion hadn’t moved, or said anything. His eyes flicked back and forth between me and Cassandra like he was watching a tennis match. Me, his sister. Me, his sister. Every time they landed on me, I flushed. “What if I don’t want to do anything next?” I asked finally.
“That’s an option,” Cassandra said. “If you want to go through life with uncontrollable powers that just go off whenever you fart or something.”
Oh God. Did she think I was the one who’d farted in the driver’s ed car? Did Dion?
“That’s not what I want. I mean…it wasn’t me,” I said, and now I really was blushing. But Cassandra wasn’t paying attention. She had jumped up and grabbed a dying plant from the windowsill and set it in the middle of the floor.
“Try,” she said. She stared at me intently, and if I hadn’t known she could start fires with her hands, I would have guessed that she could start them with her eyes. It was clear that she was waiting for me to do something with the plant.
I held my hands up in protest. “I can’t,” I said. “I mean, I don’t even know where to start….”
“Come on,” Cassandra said. “It weighs nothing. It won’t be hard to move. And once you figure it out, it’s easy.” She pivoted so that she was facing the plant, and one of the dry vines burst into flames. Dion was next to it in an instant, stomping out the fire and sending Cassandra a scorching look of his own.
“Just look at it, and use your mind to tell it what to do,” Cassandra directed. Dion stood back a few feet away from her, and was looking at me curiously. “You’re going to have to learn how to control it eventually.”
“You don’t think it’ll just go away?” That was what I had been secretly secretly hoping ever since I’d secretly started to get an idea of what was happening.
“God, I hope not!” Cassandra said, genuine fear in her voice at the thought of that happening. “Come on,” she urged. “We’re all friends here.”
Were we? I wondered, but I looked at the plant anyway. The ice in my ice pack had all melted, and now I was just holding a bag of water to my head. The throbbing had subsided, and my stomach had settled from a roil to a slow roll.
What the hell.
I tried to make my mind blank, just like in those meditation tapes Dad was always listening to, and I looked at the plant. Okay, I thought. Move, you stupid thing, move.
Just like that, it started to rise. First a wobbly inch off the ground, then two, three, until finally it hovered a foot and a half in the air.
Dion sucked in his breath, and my concentration broke, sending the plant falling back down. It landed on its side and bounced, tumbling out of the plastic pot and spilling white-flecked soil out onto the carpet.
I stood up, and Cassandra was beside me immediately, throwing her arms around me in a hug, and then we were literally jumping for joy. I had never felt so good in my entire life.
* * *
—
I spent the next hour practicing. The poor plant got beat to crap, but by the time I was done, I could hold it in the air for a full minute without even a wobble.
Finally, it was getting late and I figured I should leave, as I still had homework to pretend to do. Dion insisted on giving me a ride home, and as he walked me out, he kept a hand on my elbow to steady me. I felt totally fine now, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. On the way to their house, I’d been too out of it to really notice anything about Dion’s car, but now that we were walking down the driveway, I got my first good look.
The car was a minivan, the kind driven by people who wear Snoopy pajama pants in public and drink diet Sprite instead of water. It was light blue. Mostly. One front side panel was a burnt umber, and the sliding door was fire-engine red. The back fender was smashed, and there was silver duct tape and black plastic around one of the back windows. But what really made the car a wreck was the bumper stickers: one said “Coexist” in religious symbols, and one said “Mean People Suck.” I decided I was going to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume they’d come with the car, because it was impossible that someone with such exquisite cheekbones could have such crappy taste.
“I inherited the car too,” Dion said, as though he could read my thoughts. “A guy I used to work with gave me most of it. I just had to add the door myself.”
I nodded, as if this were a totally familiar way to get a car.
Cassandra was coming with us, and while most people would have offered me—“the guest”—shotgun, I wasn’t surprised, even though I’d only spent a few hours with her, when she climbed in and left me to sit on the floor in the back. I tried to do so as gracefully as possible, then finally gave up and sat leaning against the passenger side with my legs sprawled in front of me.
From my place on the floor I could see how clean it was. The carpet had been vacuumed. There wasn’t a speck of dirt anywhere, and the spot where I’d emptied my guts earlier had already been shampooed. He must have snuck back outside to do it while Cassandra and I were practicing.
“There’s a blanket back there if you’re cold,” Dion said, and I shivered. Not from a chill but from, well, him. When we pulled up at the first intersection, he rolled down the window and waved his arm out, and that’s when I realized the car didn’t have turn signals. I gave Dion directions to my house, and the ride took less than ten minutes. We were all quiet, and I wondered if they were as exhausted as I was. I felt almost unconscious, like I could curl up and sleep in a folding chair. When we got to my house, Dion put the van in park, then got out and walked around to open the sliding side door.
“Sorry, Es,” he said. “It’s broken and doesn’t open from the inside.” Cassandra was absorbed in changing the radio station, but Dion gave me a hug and brushed his hands across the bump on the back of my head. “I really hope that’s not a concussion,” he said, the wrinkle reappearing in his forehead.
I’d known him for less than an afternoon, and he was already abbreviating my name like I was someone he had on speed dial. I wanted not to like it, but I did. It wasn’t bro-ishly overfamiliar. It was just comfortable, like someone ordering you fries you hadn’t asked for, just because they knew that, as a human being, there was a 98.9 percent chance you liked fries.
“It’s not a concussion,” I said, not totally convinced that it was the truth, but not wanting him to worry his pretty little head about it.
“Don’t be a stranger,” he said, and all I could do was smile dumbly and nod until he turned away.
I was walking up the sidewalk when Cassandra yelled my name out the window. “Keep practicing!” she said. “You got this.”
>
I watched them drive away, and at the corner, the van sputtered and died, then started up again and drove off with a squeal. I marveled at my afternoon. It was the weirdest few hours of my life, no doubt, and had left me with more questions than answers. Was the note really all that had led Cassandra to me? That hardly seemed likely, but she hadn’t said what else her mom had left her, and I hadn’t asked. In fact, I’d hardly asked anything at all. Aside from what she’d said about her parents, we’d skipped almost all the basic getting-to-know-you kind of stuff, which made this the second time I’d hung out with Cassandra and failed to learn anything about her.
A wave of panic washed over me. Letting her into the babysitting club without a background check had come around to bite me in the ass, so maybe this was going to turn out the same. What if I’d messed up by revealing so much of myself to people I barely knew anything about?
I sighed. If I had messed up, it was too late to do anything about it now.
I let myself into the house and was greeted by a tail-wagging, drool-dangling, very-excited-to-see-me Pig. Pig only cared about two things: her family, and food, and not necessarily in that order. I knew her well enough to know that such an enthusiastic welcome meant that she probably hadn’t had dinner yet.
I went straight to the kitchen, and as I dumped kibble into her bowl, a laugh track exploded in the den. I peeked in to see that the TV was still on, but Dad was asleep on the couch, his head thrown back and his mouth open like a gasping fish. I put the food down for Pig and went to the den. When I shook Dad by the shoulder, he jerked awake like he’d been shocked.
“What time is it?” he said, pushing himself up into a sitting position.
“Almost eight.”
“Is it?” He took off his glasses and rubbed them on his T-shirt, a nervous tic that meant his glasses were almost always gross and greasy, as his T-shirts were never clean. “Make any moolah?”
This was one of Dad’s favorite questions, and it took me a second to realize that this meant he thought I’d been babysitting.
“Thirty-five dollars,” I lied, because it seemed easier than explaining that I’d just been hanging out with two people he’d never heard of before. Dad had only ever known me to hang out with Janis, because, prior to today, I’d only ever hung out with Janis.
Dad sighed and held his glasses up to the light. “You’re going to need it. The school sent me the driver’s ed bill today. Their insurance will cover most of it, but you’re still responsible for the tree.”
I stared at him, feeling like the bump on the back of my head had a heartbeat of its own. I’d managed to completely forget about the wreck, even though now I knew, without a doubt, what had happened in that driver’s seat.
“Oh,” I said, and swallowed.
Dad smiled. “It’s not actually that bad,” he said, “and it’s nothing that hasn’t happened at that school before.” His brow crinkled. “Is your head okay?”
I nodded, realizing that I was still standing there with my hand on my skull. I quickly dropped it to my side.
Dad continued. “Going over the financials got me thinking about your future, Esme. I think we should sit down and do a real frank evaluation of your options.” He looked at me like he was waiting for me to say something, but I wasn’t going to humor him by turning this into anything more than a one-sided conversation.
“I was talking to Jed the other day, and his son just started at SRCC and really likes it….” I turned away from him and started up the stairs. I stopped outside my room, as I realized that Dad had actually gotten up off the couch to follow me and was standing at the bottom of the staircase. “I’m just thinking we need to be realistic,” he said.
“I know,” I said, trying to keep from sounding too annoyed. “Can we talk about this later, though? I’m tired, and I have homework.” I went into my room and shut the door without waiting for him to answer. The afternoon had made me feel like I was floating along with that dead plant, and now Dad was yanking me right back to earth. We’d had this conversation a dozen times before, and the thing was, I knew Dad was right. We didn’t have the money for me to go someplace like Pratt or FIT, and even if we did, I probably wouldn’t get in.
All the babysitting money I was saving would barely buy a bus ticket to Cleveland. My grades were just okay, and my only extracurricular was thrifting. A huge part of Janis’s and my friendship was based on the fact that we both wanted to GTFO of Spring River, but just because we wanted out didn’t mean that we would make it out. Janis’s parents were professors. She got a 3.9 in her sleep, and went to coding camp every July. When Janis was thirteen, she actually built an app that mimicked Cher Horowitz’s closet. Would Janis still text me every night when I was studying communications at Spring River Community College and she was in Paris channeling Phoebe Philo at Celine, or at Central Saint Martins in London?
I waited a few seconds, until I heard Dad’s footsteps retreat. Then I opened the door a little bit. “Come on, girl,” I said, and Pig came trotting in and made herself a nest out of some clothes on the floor. I shut the door behind her, and she settled, giving a sigh of contentment, then started snoring with her eyes still open. I flopped down onto my bed, careful not to bump my head again, as it was still throbbing. I sighed and looked over at the door as I heard Dad come back up the stairs. There was no way he would come in without knocking, but I stared at the lock anyway. What the hell? I thought. It was worth a try. I focused, and the lock gave a little shiver, then clicked into place.
In spite of myself, I smiled a bit. If I tried really hard, maybe I could even learn to like this.
Dad considered rising with the sun to be a sign of integrity and good character.
I disagreed.
Who knew how long he’d been up by the time we met in the kitchen. He was working on a crossword, which he did diligently every single morning and still sucked at. He did them in pencil, and usually ended up erasing so much that he rubbed a hole into the paper.
“You’re going to be late,” he said without looking up.
I poured myself a cup of coffee. “No, I’m not,” I said, giving the barely warm coffee a loud slurp. “I’ve timed it perfectly so that I’ll get there at 7:57.”
“That’s almost late,” he said, licking the eraser and then grinding it into the paper.
“I like living on the edge,” I said. I felt bad about the night before. Dad wasn’t deliberately out to squash my dreams; he was just being practical. I was determined to be extra nice to him today, so I leaned over to give him a kiss on the top of his head. As I did, the front page of the local section caught my eye. I swatted his elbow so that he’d move it and I could slide that section of the paper out.
In Spring River, the local section was usually good only for a laugh and as proof of how pathetic our town was, like coverage of a planned protest against the new roundabout going in at the intersection next to the park. (“ ‘This ain’t Europe!’ said Fred Gregorson when asked why he was in opposition to the city’s new roundabout.” Janis had actually cut that one out and taped it to her bathroom mirror. It was motivation, she said, to never forget why she wanted to leave.) Or the local section might provide a serious review of the latest chain restaurant opening. (“When dining at Olive Garden, the breadsticks are a must.”)
But today there was an article I wanted to read. A demo date had finally been set for the Triple Lakes mall, which had been pretty much abandoned for the past several years. It was scheduled to be knocked down on December 31.
“Why would they blow up the mall on New Year’s Eve?” I asked, and Dad scanned the article.
“Probably something to do with taxes,” he said, and I kept reading. Until then, the mall’s last gasp of life would be as the Mall of Terror, a haunted house where “prices aren’t the only things that get slashed.” The article was illustrated with a picture of the mall, whi
ch was now totally decrepit and creepy enough without any decorations, and the Mall of Terror poster, which was illustrated with a blood-soaked shopping bag full of eyeballs and severed limbs.
I couldn’t help but feel somewhat nostalgic for the days when I could still buy stuff at the mall, and the food court wasn’t just for zombies snacking on rancid brains. That mall was where Dad had taken me back-to-school shopping before I’d discovered thrift stores, and it was where I used to go to spend my babysitting money on cupcake-scented glitter body lotion and multipacks of earrings that turned my skin green, back in the original babysitters club days.
Dad clearing his throat snapped me out of my memories and back to the kitchen. “Esme,” he said. “Clock’s ticking. You better move it, unless you want to take the bus.”
“I know, I know,” I said, draining the last of my coffee. “I’m practically ready.”
* * *
—
My look today was “Y2K VMAs,” a nod to the pre–Rachel Zoe glory days before celebs started using stylists,” and was entirely plastic from head to toe—vinyl, polyester, rayon, oh my! But in spite of what I knew was a really good outfit, I felt nervous and on edge. As I walked down the hall to my first class, I scanned every passing face to see if it was Cassandra’s. The only thing I could compare this to was the feeling I’d had sophomore year after I’d kissed Jordan McFadden, my longtime crush, at the mini-golf course and wondered if things would be any different between us at school. (News flash: they weren’t.)
What would I say to Cassandra if I saw her? What would she say to me? In the same minute, I’d go back and forth between hoping she’d want to talk about it more, and hoping she’d pretend that we’d never talked about it at all.
Even though I still wasn’t even sure what “it” was.
The Babysitters Coven Page 8